I have readNadine Gordimer, July's People (1981)
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I have written... nothing ...
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out of Africa
July's People is a captivating novel. One of those stories. How the things went down, down, down, how the white people had to flee. I have read it before, just like O Retorno of Dulce Maria Cardoso and many others. There is a pattern of those colonial stories, the way how things end. Even if this particular story is an example of the genre called Alternate History. Such an end of South African apartheid, a collapse into a civil war, actually never happened. But it all sounds so disturbingly probable. No wonder the book had been prohibited in South Africa, not only immediately after its publication in 1981, but also by the first post-apartheid government. Apparently, it did not condemn the racism with sufficient clarity.
The liberal Smales family, forced to flee Johannesburg, is received in the house of their own servant, several hundred miles from the city. Fifteen years earlier, their servant came all that way up on foot, in order to get his miserable employment. Now, the way down is quicker, made in his former boss' yellow pickup. That July will soon claim as his own. Carnivalesquely, the places and social functions are inverted. Or not quite so, since July says his former employer Maureen that she shouldn't work with the other women, and the ex-boss, former architect, is asked to perform the duties of a shooting instructor, a role in which he does not feel quite competent.
Yet before it comes to real shooting, a helicopter comes. It always does. The desperation of the white has always an end. There is always a solution, a salvation, an alliance, a return. The white darkness is never like the black one.
Nadine Gordimer, July's People, read in a Polish translation.
Kraków, 24.07.2022.
The liberal Smales family, forced to flee Johannesburg, is received in the house of their own servant, several hundred miles from the city. Fifteen years earlier, their servant came all that way up on foot, in order to get his miserable employment. Now, the way down is quicker, made in his former boss' yellow pickup. That July will soon claim as his own. Carnivalesquely, the places and social functions are inverted. Or not quite so, since July says his former employer Maureen that she shouldn't work with the other women, and the ex-boss, former architect, is asked to perform the duties of a shooting instructor, a role in which he does not feel quite competent.
Yet before it comes to real shooting, a helicopter comes. It always does. The desperation of the white has always an end. There is always a solution, a salvation, an alliance, a return. The white darkness is never like the black one.
Nadine Gordimer, July's People, read in a Polish translation.
Kraków, 24.07.2022.
